“DIABETES doesn't define me and I'VE NEVER LET IT STOP ME.”

Eighty-two-year-old Peter Eaton has not only been living with type 1 diabetes for 75 years, in 2004, he became one of the first people in Australia to start using an insulin pump. For someone who didn’t think he’d live to see his 20th birthday when he was diagnosed with diabetes as a seven-year-old, Peter’s life has been one incredibly well lived.

- KAREN FITTALL.

“I found out I had diabetes in the middle of 1946, not long after my seventh birthday. I’d been feeling a bit tired so my mother took me to see the local doctor in Milton in NSW, where we lived, and he picked up on the fact that I had diabetes straight away. That was actually pretty astute of him at the time.

“I spent about a week in the Milton hospital while they arranged for me to go up to the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Sydney, which seemed to be the only place where diabetes was treated.

“That hospital became my home for the next six months and basically, after the first couple of weeks, I had the run of the place.

The grounds were extensive and you could wander anywhere you liked – and I did. I’d go around helping the nurses and they also had a school there, so I attended that, too.

“One of the main things I remember is that underneath my ward there was a place where this old guy used to sharpen the needles for the hospital, including those used to inject my insulin. They were much bigger in those days – probably four or five times the diameter of the needles we use today, and they were never really sharp. Thank goodness I was only having one injection a day!

“I didn’t start doing my own injections until I was about 11 or 12 and it was my mum who tested my urine to try and work out how much insulin I needed. Looking back, it couldn’t have been very accurate, but I survived.”